Timothy Scott Bennett's Blog: Everything is Research: Life, Asperger's, and the Written Word, page 8

Writing as Remote Viewing

Every now and then, somebody asks me about my writing process. More often than not, I compare it to remote viewing.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the term, remote viewing is “the practice of seeking impressions about a distant or unseen target using subjective means, in particular, extrasensory perception (ESP) or “sensing with mind”. Google it, if you wish, and read for days and days.

Apart from the whole matter of what remote viewing is™ or isn’t™, whether it’s real™ or imagined™ (and what the reality about that distinction might actually be…), remote viewing serves as a great metaphor for what it feels like when I write.

I don’t start with much. A few characters. A beginning premise or situation or conflict. Maybe a few vague notes about character or setting or plot. An idea or two about where the story might be headed. Then I close my eyes, find my characters, and follow them around, observing where they go and what they do and what they say. I write down what I observe.

Some days the “seeing” is good. Other days it’s gray and muddled. Sometimes it’s very visual, other times auditory, or emotional. However it presents itself, I just do my best to capture the story as it unfolds. And then, on subsequent drafts, I go back to the places that were fuzzy and jumbled, and try to view more precisely, and fill in the gray spots, and correct the things I had not seen clearly the first time through.

It’s a bit of a high-wire act, I know. An act of trust in something other than my rational mind. A process that could go horribly awry. But based on my reviews, it seems to be working for me. And my own experience shows me, over and over, that I can trust my process. I find myself regularly amazed at how plot twists and character details and thematic ideas appear, settle in, shape and guide the story, and eventually all fit together as if I had planned it that way. It’s an exciting way to work. And so fun. And ultimately, quite fulfilling, as I feel connected, in that process, with the “something larger” that my rational mind tells me is there.

It feels as though the characters live outside of me, as if the story is unfolding in some other portion of the great Mind At Large. Inside the Idealist philosophy, I might argue that it actually is. From the dominant Materialist philosophy, I might argue that the story I’m “observing,” as if from the outside, is really all inside of my own brain, bubbling slowly to consciousness. As someone committed to sitting with all of the above whenever I can, I could argue that the distinctions I might make between “inside my mind” and “outside my mind” are merely matters of perspective and focus.

In the end, I don’t feel like arguing for anything. It works for me, and so I do it. I love my process for the places it takes me, the people I meet, and the wondrous things I get to see when I’m with them.

That’s enough for me. I trust that it is enough for my readers.

A Perfect Record #3 – Peter Gabriel (Car)

I remember what a blow it had been, to learn that Peter Gabriel was leaving Genesis. My high school friends and I were heavily into “Prog Rock,” and used it as a means to define ourselves as “cool” and “hip” and “not them” in the era of Donna Summer and Disco Duck. Genesis was at what seemed to be their artistic height. How could he leave?

I remained loyal to Genesis in the post-Gabriel years, but they were changed. The music was different. And Peter Gabriel’s solo work, when it started to appear, was different as well. I didn’t much like that it was different. Not at first. I liked Genesis the way they had been and wanted them to continue exactly what they doing. But because we’d all been so good together in the past, I stuck with them: Genesis without Peter Gabriel and Peter Gabriel without Genesis. I listened, and I listened again, and again. Eventually I settled down and fell back in love.

Listening today, I’m surprised that Gabriel’s first solo album felt like such a challenge at the time, as it’s an old friend now. The first two cuts were a perfect transition, Moribund the Burgermeister serving as a look back at Gabriel’s Genesis years, and Solsbury Hill serving as both an explanation for his departure and a decisive nod in the direction he was heading. The rest of the album introduced a number of new sounds he would explore in subsequent years. Excuse Me added a bit of levity to the mix.

I’m not sure that every track is a classic. It’s not that which makes this album “perfect,” not in the way I might judge So or Us. What makes this album “perfect” is that it contained two of the most “perfect” songs I know: Solsbury Hill and Here Comes the Flood. Solsbury Hill feels, to me, like a master class in lyric writing, the images so vivid, the “explanation” so heartfelt and real, all riding on the epic 7/4 time signature, the “tribal” percussion, and that iconic acoustic strum. His words became my words, his story my story, his quest my quest. It was an early step in my own journey of self-understanding, as if Peter Gabriel himself had “come to take me home.” I still tear up, to hear that song today.

And Here Comes the Flood? It spoke to my nascent sense of the world around me, a sense which would blossom eventually into the full-blown awareness of the global situation that compelled me through the process of making and marketing What a Way to Go, and beyond, into a more open view of the nature of reality itself, and the limitations of the dominant paradigm, and the possibility of living at the edge of that worldview, and On Beyond Zebra. Lush, epic, bombastic, quiet, the song took me to feeling spaces I had difficulty achieving on my own. Thus enlivened, I could find my own power to “give my island to survive.”

As with most of the artists I might write about, it is difficult to choose which one of their recordings might be the most “perfect.” Gabriel’s solo work propelled him to huge popularity and new creative heights, and deservedly so, I think. But this album, his first one “on his own,” with all its supposed weak spots and flaws, occupies a spot in my heart his other works do not. It “saved my life” more than once through the years, and comforted me during some very difficult times. Ultimately, it has helped me to “show another me.”

My heart going boom, boom, boom…

I Like to Watch – Episode 2

As I alluded to in Episode 1, and as Sally mentioned in her comment, there’s another reason that “I like to watch.” Perhaps it’s the major reason. On television and in movies, people live out loud. Which is to say that television reveals things that many (or most, in my experience) real people, in their real lives, work to conceal: their emotional states, their judgmental thoughts, their mistakes and faults, their guilt, their shame, their woundedness, and their secret desires.

On television and in movies, when someone is angry, you know that person is angry, because they scream it or rant it or lash out. If someone is sad, you know they are sad, because they sob and collapse and crawl into bed. If someone is motivated by the lingering pain of an old loss or failure, they show us a flashback. If one character is offended by the actions of another, they fight it out. If a character is afraid, they share it with others. If one character wants to hit another one, or push them in front of a train, or set them up for blackmail, or have an affair, they do so.

Television takes us inside the human experience and reveals it. Television characters become translucent. You get to see inside of them.

All of which can be like candy to Aspies, who can have trouble reading others. For myself, while I’m highly sensitized to emotional and psychological energies, and usually at least know when they are present, I can have a devil of a time understanding what those energies mean, especially insofar as they are further obfuscated by others’ attempts to hide them.

I’ve been studying human beings my entire life, of course, and have read and trained a great deal in the matter of human psychology and human emotionality, and I have had Sally, herself a skilled and intuitive therapist, as a constant teacher. So I’m pretty good at observing behaviors and noticing patterns, and then analyzing what I have observed based on past experience and acquired knowledge. But there’s much that I miss in the moment, and only so much I can know about any particular individual, and in the presence of emotion, my own internal systems go on high alert, making it extremely difficult to focus on anyone but myself.

But television characters make it easy. They tell me what is going on with them.

Perhaps not surprisingly, so do Sally’s kids. Raised, or now living, inside of a family system which values, demands, encourages, and facilitates the processing of feelings, differences, and conflicts, and the sharing of one’s felt experience of the world, her son, her daughter, and her daughter-in-law all live just as out loud as television characters. They say what’s going on with them. They share their feelings. They reveal their vulnerabilities, their dreams, their wounds, their strengths, and their judgmental thoughts. If they are offended or confused or angry, they say so. If they need something they are not getting, they put voice to it. If they find themselves motivated by old hurts or unacknowledged desires, they find a way to tell you. It may not work as quickly or as easily as we often find on television, but their family system eventually finds a way to surface and process that which needs to be spoken out loud.

Which is more candy for me.

As long as none of them harbors a desire to push me in front of a train.

(Episode 3 Coming Soon)

(Read Episode 1 Here)

 

More Hank Than Max – Part 4: My Asperger’s

I’m still peeling away layers of that onion of Identity I spoke of in Part 1. I’ve examined the outer layer of “how I look,” from both my own point of view and from the point of view of others, and I’ve found the layer hidden beneath, and pondered the reasons for why it was concealed. But what is that layer, exactly? What is it that stays mostly hidden? What is my Asperger’s?

Sometimes I think of Asperger’s as a story I tell about myself, a story that explains and brings meaning and provides both relief and guidance. The story came to me over two years ago, a “gift from the gods” which descended upon me in the utter darkness of winter, at a time when my own internal season aligned with the bleak, dim, muddy, icy outer world through which I walked. The story of Asperger’s shed light and warmth on my soul, and helped me to understand why my life had gone as it had, why it was going how it was going, and why so much of it felt as difficult and challenging and confusing as it did.

It helped me to notice my actual experience in the world. I was now allowed to notice it. And noticing myself inside of the story of Asperger’s allowed me to allow myself, to let me be who I was, to embrace myself, to cherish myself, just as Sally had always allowed and embraced and cherished who I was.

I noticed how my days went, how I followed my many rituals and routines with almost panicked urgency, lest they be interrupted or thwarted, so desperately did I need their magic.

I noticed how much time I spent “on high alert,” and the energy it took to maintain my outer cordon of emotional and psychological fencing and razor wire, and how spent I felt at day’s end.

I noticed the many sensory stimuli that poked me, scraped me, slimed me, pricked me, blinded me, pushed me, pestered me, revolted me, and teased me to the point of exhaustion; the stray lights at the corners of my eye, the cacophony of restaurants, the irritations of fabric, the confinements of lotions and oils, the screaming wrongness of mouth sounds.

I noticed how thoroughly I discount the world of “others,” how completely the world is “all about me,” how much I miss, how much I disregard, how much I fail to comprehend, how poorly I listen, how much I presume.

I noticed how fierce anxiety and chronic worry wash across my being like ocean waves, how they fill me, dampen me, chill me, burden me, depositing me drained and limp on the shoreline of my life.

I noticed.

Suddenly it all made sense. My social terror and awkwardness. My abject fear of the telephone. My uncommon fascinations and lifelong preoccupations. My random squeamishness. My constant assessment of right and wrong. My flapping hands and twitching face and tapping feet. My stilted affect and truncated feelings. My controlling nature. My love of sameness and my fear of change. My lack of close friends. My inability to grok such human words as “love” and “proud” and “missing you” and “friendship” and “connection” in the way that others seemed to be using them.

I could look back over my life and begin to understand the what and why of who and how I had been. How rude I had sometimes acted. How thoughtless. How careless. How bored I had often felt. How trapped. How lost. How distant I may have seemed to those around me. How aloof. How taciturn. How difficult to understand. How I had needs for quiet and solitude and stimulation and connection that were not the same as for others around me. How much pain that caused me. And how unable I was to even know what those needs were, let alone communicate them to the people around me in such a way that the needs might be met.

I began to understand.

And in understanding, warmed by the glow of insight from the story of Asperger’s, I began to allow.

That little Timmy, that little Max, that sensitive little alien who had hidden himself in order to keep from being hurt, completed a huge portion of the journey back to himself, a journey that he’d begun many years before. The story of Asperger’s threw fresh sunlight across his path, and brought meaning and explanation and compassion and a sense of almost epic accomplishment to his journey. Under the light of a fresh dawning, he was able to climb to the next high peak.

And here he is.

And here I am.

The view is marvelous.

Hi there.

To riff off the great John Lennon, I am Max, and Hank is me, and we are we, and we are all together.

And we very much like ourselves now.

Because, now, we are allowed to.

(Part 5 Coming Soon)

(Read Part 3 Here)

The General Departs – An Excerpt from Rumi’s Field

The General looked up to the television screen as the image of Linda Travis pushed a stray lock of hair from her face and stepped to a podium decorated with the Presidential Seal. She was alone in her room, and everybody knew it, but the podium would give the impression of a press conference, and add a grace note of calm normality to the event. The General smiled as he sipped his beer. Image was everything. It always would be. He checked his watch. He still had an hour before his flight. Plenty of time to enjoy this.

Dressed in blue jeans and a loose-fitting University of Maine sweatshirt, her clothes no doubt chosen to hearken back to her first campaign, the President smiled briefly to the camera and began. “Good morning, all. Thank you for joining me. I am here today to announce my intention to seek re-election.” The President paused for a moment, as if giving the news a moment to sink in. The General glanced around the airport bar. There were only three other people in the room, including the bartender, but all were watching closely. This announcement had been a long time coming.

The President continued, glancing down at her notes. “This will likely come as a surprise to most of you,” she said, “given the events of the past year. And surely the timing could be better.” Linda looked directly into the camera. “The last thing a grieving nation needs is more self-serving blather from a politician.” She stopped and took a sip from the water glass on her podium. The General lifted his mug and drained it, then knocked on the bar to get the tender’s attention and motioned for a refill. The airport’s air conditioning was struggling to keep up and his throat was dry.

The door behind the President clicked open and Linda turned to see the surprised face of a nurse through the thick, protective faceplate of her biocontainment suit. “Sorry,” hissed the young woman, glancing at the camera in mortified horror before pulling the door quickly shut. Linda smiled grimly and turned back to her audience. The rash that stretched over the bridge of her nose from cheek to cheek glared brightly red under the overhead fluorescents.

Linda raised a hand as if she would rub the rash, then stopped herself. She grabbed both sides of the podium and continued. “But we do not always get to choose our circumstances,” she said firmly, “and the demands of this time outweigh mere political considerations. As hard as things have become, as mistaken as I have proven to be, as compromised as I now am, there is no one else as qualified and experienced as myself to lead this great nation forward at this time. Love me or hate me, you surely all know who I am. And you know that what I say is true.”

The General raised his mug in admiration. This was masterfully done, every detail in place, and it drew its power from Linda Travis’ proven ability to move people. All she had to do was tell people what to think, and most of them would just go ahead and think it. The General noted that the bartender and the other customers were all nodding their heads in agreement with the President’s words. He smirked. They had likely complained bitterly about Linda Travis in the past twenty-four hours, if the polls were to be believed. And yet they nodded. Such was her reputation for truth telling. Such was their longing for truth. And such was America’s seeming inability to remember anything for more than a day or two. It was only four years ago that Linda Travis had promised to serve only one term. Would they not remember even that?

“Whether I am elected to serve another term or not, I have not yet finished this one, and I still serve the vows I took on the day of my inauguration. To that end, I have called for a new summit of political, corporate, and military leaders to discuss our next steps. We will meet tomorrow, and will continue to meet until our course is clear. Certainly this most recent aggression cannot be allowed to stand. And certainly we must bring some strong measure of relief to the American people. I will accept nothing less.”

The President glanced back at the door behind her, as if wishing for escape, then looked again at the camera. Her pale skin tones heightened the effect of her rash, making it look more like war paint than the “alien flu” the papers reported. And the General detected an angry glint in her eyes and a shaking of her jaw that matched that war paint. It was an interesting decision, to show such anger. He wondered how that would play on the evening news.

“We are down,” the President said, her voice soft and full. “But we are not out. I am down. But I am not out. We have what we need to get through this. You have it. I have it. Your neighbors and friends and family have it. I saw that every time I walked amongst you. I see it still, even trapped in these rooms. We have what it takes. And we will make it through this.” Linda Travis stopped and took a long, deep breath. She nodded firmly and smiled a slight smile. “Have courage,” she said. With that she pressed a button on her podium. The screen went blank for just a moment, then switched back to the studio, where commentators would no doubt comment. The bartender muted the television.

The General drained his mug and wiped his lips with a paper napkin. As far as the public would be concerned, President Linda Travis had just admitted mistakes, threatened retaliation, and was now seeking counsel from the very people she’d spent the last two years excluding. Of course she was, given what had happened at Sebago Lake. The timing was perfect.

The General stood and pulled on his windbreaker, noting himself in the mirror behind the bar. Polo shirt. Twill slacks. He was a General no longer. Just some shrunken old guy rich enough to afford plane fare. He picked up his briefcase and headed toward the door. Time to find a good novel for the flight. Then maybe he’d head to the gate. He loved to be first in line, even with so few fellow flyers. And there were sure to be protestors at the security checkpoint.

The General patted his shirt pocket to make sure his ticket was there. It was. He’d bought a return ticket, to avoid questions, but he did not plan to use it. Soon enough, flights such as his would all be cancelled, but the General had no intention of ever coming back in any event.

A Perfect Record #2 – Remain In Light

The Talking Heads –Remain in Light.

I’d seen the Talking Heads perform on Saturday Night Live, and had brought a copy of their latest, More Songs About Buildings & Food, back to my college apartment, where my taste in music was teased and scorned by my roommates, such “silly” genres as “New Wave” and “Punk” being the objects of their derision at the time. It didn’t matter. I couldn’t help it. As much as I wanted to fit in with my peers, the Talking Heads’ music moved me. Two years later, Remain in Light arrived, confirming my early adoption. It was, and remains, a master work.

Those exotic, tribal drums. The nervous, stuttering guitar. Those funky bass slaps. David Byrne’s clear, precise vocals and quirky lyrics. This music was smart, passionate, driving, and nothing like I’d heard before. It was anxious. It was paranoid. It was mysterious and obscure and strange and alive. This music reflected something strong that lived inside of me, and gave it an expression it had not before had. From the opening percussion line of Born Under Punches to the final droning cries of The Overload, this music was mine. Had I felt free to dance at the time, this was the music I’d have danced to.

More Hank Than Max – Part 3: The Hidden Syndrome

I’ve seen Asperger’s referred to as hidden: the hidden disability, the hidden autism, the hidden syndrome. The word “hidden” is used because many so-called “high functioning Aspies/Autistics” (HFA’s) have the seeming superpower of being able to fit so easily into “neurotypical” society as to go unseen, like leopards in the jungle, say, or “aliens among us.” So “normal” do some HFA’s appear to be to the people around them that, upon their decision to disclose their diagnosis, they are greeted with disbelief, denial, and derision.

Which sounds like fun, right? I mean, who doesn’t like having their reality denied by others? Especially when it feels like a great risk to share that reality in the first place.

We can, of course, blame this denial on the Asperger’s stereotypes in operation. If the stereotype says that Asperger’s looks like Max, and I don’t look like Max, then I don’t have Asperger’s. It’s a simple equation. An easy matter of Venn diagrams. And the human mind likes things easy, as was so beautifully explicated in Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow. The stereotypes operate for a reason, I think, so we need not wonder that they exist. If the diagnosis of Asperger’s or Autism is a claim to differences, then it only makes sense that people will highlight the most obvious, observable differences and turn them into a “type,” something that they can wrap their minds around. But since the type doesn’t do justice to the full reality, those who seek the truth will need to see beyond it, and it can take a great deal of time, energy, and education to displace such easy beliefs with more nuanced reality.

But it’s more than just a matter of falling outside the stereotypes, I think. At least for me. Truth be told, I worked hard to hide. I embraced my outer Hank and turned my back on my inner Max. I chose to fit in as best I could, and painted my fur with leopard spots to blend in with the sun-dappled foliage of neurotypical culture. I kept myself hidden, even from myself.

Until I failed, that is. Until I stopped.

That I went into hiding is completely understandable, of course. “Sticking out” can be painful and frightening. “Fitting in” can feel safe and comes with rewards. Ask The Ugly Duckling. Ask Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Even the birds know this.

I don’t really remember how it started, but there is a telling piece of archaeological evidence that has helped me, along with other bits of data, to connect together the skeleton of a story. In the late 90s, while putting together a scrapbook of my life for a Landmark Education program, I uncovered an ancient relic: my kindergarten report card. Written on the back was a note from my teacher, explaining that while Timmy was a joy to have in class, he was extremely sensitive. She was working to correct this, she said, as I would be much happier were I not so easily affected.

Looking back over my life now, I can imagine that extremely sensitive Timmy, and the pressures on him to hide. And from this current high vantage point on my life’s trail, I can see how successful he was at it. He was extremely smart, a skilled and talented observer gifted at pattern recognition. And he had two older brothers modeling possible paths for him to take – the “good boy” and “the rebel.” He was no dummy, and could see which side of that particular piece of bread was getting buttered. He followed the good boy.

He also had the good fortune of growing up in a rather idyllic situation. He spent his formative years in the rural Michigan countryside, surrounded by fields and woodlands and streams and farm animals on the one hand, and by a large extended farming family on the other. And he attended a one-room schoolhouse of maybe twenty students total, where his tiny cohort of four or five advanced together from grade to grade with the same teacher. When he needed solitude, there were places to go to get away. When he needed help or understanding, there were many relatives from whom he could choose. If he had quirks or oddities or sensitivities, they were such old news that they scarcely registered.

He found a way to be okay, this lost little alien walking amongst them. He took on understanding the ways of human beings as an anthropological research project, and learned to mimic their gestures, speak their languages, and participate in their rites and celebrations. The Max part of him he hid as best he could. The Hank part of him he showed to the world. Because he lacked, or had learned to hide, some of the more obvious outward traits of an Aspie, he fit in quite well, rarely raising suspicions.

And all it cost him was that he had to almost totally shut himself off from his true nature for most of his life.

(Part 4 Coming Soon)

(Read Part 2 Here)

 

 

 

A Perfect Record #1 – American Woman

Music has always been my salvation. Some recordings strike me as “perfect” from beginning to end. Even were I to go deaf, I would still be able to listen to these on the turntable of my mind, so ingrained into my consciousness are these albums. In this ongoing series, I’ll take a quick peek at some of the perfect records that have shaped my life.

The Guess Who – American Woman. It was 1970. The whole hippie thing was everywhere, and I wanted to be a part of it. But I was only twelve. My only avenue for participation was the music, brought home on vinyl (we called them “records” or “albums” back then) by one or both of my older brothers. I think I actually remember being in the car, driving home from a shopping trip to 28th Street in Grand Rapids, MI, and looking at the album cover as we drove. It was probably my mother driving. It was probably Dave who had purchased the album. The memory comes with a feeling of excitement, as we were now heading home to listen to it. And it comes with a deep, aching longing triggered, I think, by the psychedelic images and copy on the cover. Something larger than my small, rural life was going on out there in the world, and I was missing it!

This album stirred my young, lonely heart. Burton Cummings’ voice, one of the best in rock in my opinion, was so beautiful, and so real. And the music… there was not a clunker on either side. The mix of acoustic and electric guitars on the title cut, and that riff when it kicked in, on top of almost tribal drums. The No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature medley with that overlapped last verse and Cummings’ soaring voice. Proper Stranger‘s darker vibe. Talisman’s lush quiet. I didn’t really know what the lyrics meant. But I could feel that they came from a larger world. I wanted to touch that world.

 

A Perfect Record #1

Music has always been my salvation. Some recordings strike me as “perfect” from beginning to end. Even were I to go deaf, I would still be able to listen to these on the turntable of my mind, so ingrained into my consciousness are these albums. In this ongoing series, I’ll take a quick peek at some of the perfect records that have shaped my life.

The Guess Who – American Woman. It was 1970. The whole hippie thing was everywhere, and I wanted to be a part of it. But I was only twelve. My only avenue for participation was the music, brought home on vinyl (we called them “records” or “albums” back then) by one or both of my older brothers. I think I actually remember being in the car, driving home from a shopping trip to 28th Street in Grand Rapids, MI, and looking at the album cover as we drove. It was probably my mother driving. It was probably Dave who had purchased the album. The memory comes with a feeling of excitement, as we were now heading home to listen to it. And it comes with a deep, aching longing triggered, I think, by the psychedelic images and copy on the cover. Something larger than my small, rural life was going on out there in the world, and I was missing it!

This album stirred my young, lonely heart. Burton Cummings’ voice, one of the best in rock in my opinion, was so beautiful, and so real. And the music… there was not a clunker on either side. The mix of acoustic and electric guitars on the title cut, and that riff when it kicked in, on top of almost tribal drums. The No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature medley with that overlapped last verse and Cummings’ soaring voice. Proper Stranger‘s darker vibe. Talisman’s lush quiet. I didn’t really know what the lyrics meant. But I could feel that they came from a larger world. I wanted to touch that world.

 

More Hank Than Max – Part 2: Do I Look Aspie to You?

Now, Sally has argued that I actually exhibit many more Aspie traits than I think I do. She is, as you may know, a professional observer of human beings, having spent most of her adult life as a talented and skilled therapist, so it has made sense to me to listen to her about this. And I will admit that, in the past two years, now that I’ve been looking, I have begun to notice for myself (and actually feel) the evidence for her argument, not only in my daily habits and current interactions with others, but in remembered moments from my past, as I’ve leafed through the pages of my own life story in search of myself.

Small bits of evidence are as immediate as this last weekend, when we took a short trip. I butted into a conversation between people I do not know because I overheard them talking and had a corrective piece of information I thought they needed to have. (No, I’m sorry, you’re wrong. Tim Curry is not dead. He just signed on as the Criminologist in the Rocky Horror remake!) I had to turn away and look mostly at Sally during much of the meeting we’d traveled to attend, because I found the eye contact with the man with whom we were meeting to be discomfiting and confusing. Before heading home, I said goodbye to Sally’s children with little more than a perfunctory, from a distance, remembered-at-the-last-second wave of the hand instead of the more appropriate and traditional hugs and handshakes. And it was only later, thinking upon these things, that I realized than any or all of these actions might have seemed rather odd, or worse, to the people with whom I was interacting.

And then there’s the fact that I’m largely estranged from my family of origin, including my own children. And there’s the way I acted out my unspeakable frustrations, for years, in that family system. And my predilection for researching, talking about, and writing about such “off the normal curve” special interests™ as the collapse of civilization, lost ancient societies, UFOs and aliens, paradoxes and paradigms, mind-challenging philosophies and deeply entrenched conspiracies. (And I suppose we can now add Asperger’s itself to that list.) And the fact that, on that rare occasion that I do attend some sort of social gathering (usually at Sally’s strong suggestion or invitation), unless I know the people well, (and there are only a few of them), I either say very little, find some place to hide, or speak mostly to the dogs and cats that live there. And the fact that, apart from Sally, I have almost no “close friends.”

But other than that, no, I don’t “look Aspie” at all.

Which is to say, perhaps, that, given the insanities of the world in which we live, and the current state of human beings living in the dim light cast by the last glowing embers of the Age of Exuberance, and the fact that I simply feel like “me,” and that “me” feels “right” and “normal,” none of these “outward signs,” in and of themselves, were enough to convince me.

Which is probably why the trail up the slope of Recognition and Resonance to the high ridge of Assessment and the peak of Diagnosis (from the Greek, meaning to know as apart from, to discern) took as long to traverse as it did. That and the fact that, until 1992, there was no such thing as an “Asperger’s Diagnosis” at all. And the fact that Asperger’s is a syndrome which lies on a spectrum, which means that “how it looks” will vary wildly from person to person, bringing the lie to any and all attempts to stereotype it.

Yet the stereotypes are out there, obscuring the subtleties and variations of truth and experience. Being “More Hank Than Max,” the truth of my own experience was more difficult for me to discern. And frankly, that difficulty was what I’d been trying to achieve. Though I was not aware of it at the time, in a very real way “Hank” was exactly who I’d created myself to be.

(Part 3 Coming Soon)

(Read Part 1 Here)